ENDLESS NIGHT

by Assem Bazzi

published June 2026

perfect bound trade paperback

9 x 6 inches, 67 pages 

ISBN 978-1-942723-21-9

Endless Night is a poetry book about how the world ends and then resumes. It starts in an uncomfortable bed, wakes up in empty streets, prays for an endless night, witnesses the apocalypse, yearns for a morning after the unbearable, then finally dives back onto a pillow.

Note: If you are in Lebanon, distribution delays under the current ruinous circumstances are inevitable. Also, you are likely to pay lower shipping fees if you order from a vendor closer to home—Librairie Antoine will have copies available for sale.

Praise for ENDLESS NIGHT

“This is a document about dislocation, disembodiment and damnation. The poems abandon performative ‘resilience’ and move inwards to embrace the murky experience of mundane, impure, existence. Assem is not even interested in the Trauma Olympics of survivalist epics and the trumpeters of hope, nor the ‘poetic propagandas’ of grandeur, selective memories forged by tears and gunpowder. The empty-eyed, jaded poet/witness whispers a different song. This is a poetics of death (damnation?) in the face of those who tango on our graves and convince us that our accidental martyrdom has meaning. This is less about embracing defeat so much as choosing not to partake in the theatrics of it all.

Endless Night is a nuanced exclamation of humanity, by refusing to be enchanted by either life or death. Just recognizing that we are all fucked. It takes a different kind of courage to embrace Damnation without yielding to it.

Those who have walked in the darkness, who know the stench of ordinary death reeking from the concrete, the witnesses of hollow promises and lurking dooms, they know that the night has been, still is, and will remain. They are too familiar with the Night to be shook by it.”

—Nour M.J. Hodeib, founder of el-Yafta poetry circle

“Somewhere between Beirut and New York, a poet wanders through the streets, searching for the end of an apocalypse.

Endless Night carries the reader through a single, unbroken night where the inner and outer worlds collide. In its span, a life fractures and multiplies; from the quiet ritual of morning coffee to the brutal immediacy of war, to the hushed refuge of a library. Each moment is rendered with clarity and urgency, tracing the shifting contours of what it means to endure, to remember, and to begin again.

Bazzi moves seamlessly between the pulse of spoken word and the discipline of classical poetics, creating a voice that is both immediate and enduring, one that lingers long after the final page.”

—C.J. Raffoul, Chief Editor at Astarte Editing

Assem Bazzi discussed Endless Night with Batoul Yazbek of Al-Modon in an in-depth interview on September 12, 2026. Here is an excerpt, translated into English:

“What distinguishes Assem Bazzi is not that he is one of the few poets who write and publish poetry in English in an Arab country like Lebanon. Nor is it that he is one of those unique personalities that you rarely stumble upon in Beirut's cafés and bars. Nor is it even that he is part of the Beirut youth scene, which remains, for many outsiders, a world that is almost unknown,

Assem captivates me for more than one reason. Beyond my friendship and my fond gentle remorse for him, I see in him something outside of context, outside of time, and perhaps even outside of space. Anyone who knows Assem, the exceptionally gifted poet, knows that he is almost a complete cinematic figure: the chain smoker, the self-aware Socratic, the man with the dark sense of humor, the "New Yorker" forcibly confined to Beirut, and one of the few in this city who lives authentically, without apologizing for who he is or being overly concerned with what others think. He might even agree with them, sometimes, if he finds they have valid reasons for it.

This year, Bazzi published his second poetry book, "Endless Night", with  Ornithopter Press, four years after his first book "From Martyr to Rat", with Barzakh. Between the two books, cities changed, borders closed, a pandemic struck, and crises and wars erupted, yet the nightmarish idea that began in New York continued to haunt him, even in Beirut: What if an endless night descended upon the world?”